Now playing: How Netflix hopes to unravel the global-local maze

Jonathan Friedland is the chief communications officer at the California-headquartered Netflix. In an exclusive chat with Amit Bapna, he unspools the Netflix plans for India, how it hopes to unravel the global-local maze amongst other things.

Excerpts.

The Market-entry Tool-kit

Whenever we enter a new market, over a period, we do a combination of original and local content. When I say local it does not matter whether Hollywood or English or Indian – it's about having rights to it. We learn in each country and improve the localisation on a variety of levels. In the US we have been operating for 20 years before we did our first piece of original content, and we were in Mexico for 4 years before we did the first original content. When we entered France and Italy we started doing original content faster. We are learning as we go and are getting better at it.

The content arsenal

We look at great creators across markets who have a track record of storytelling and then determine how much money to spend. We use our audience data to size the investment in a program. We don't use our data to figure out stories or people to work with but to figure out the investment in a project. In India we have already started looking at projects.

The global versus local dilemma

Everyone has been saying Netflix does not have much Indian content. That's true and we will never ever have the deepest catalogue. We can't and we won't. That is not the way we think. We think about providing great stories from all over the world for people all over the world. We are not trying to be Eros or trying to do what Hungama or other leading Indian creators of entertainment do.

We recognise India is very complicated. To begin with, we will primarily aim the service to a certain set of consumers – who are likely to speak English, who are likely to enjoy Western entertainment, likely to have an international credit card and who may have an iTunes account. Over-time we would deepen our content in India to offer a wider service to a broader Indian population, which would also include creation of local content in India for not only India but for the world. We are doing it in many other parts of the world already like Columbia, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and the UK etc.

We learn and we get better

We always tell people that our first day will be the worst – because it'll get better from there. From now to March, you will see the amount of content on the site will continue to change. Every day we are learning about what people want to watch and are adding content. For example, when we started in Brazil, none of the content seemed right. Over the period of 4-5 years we improved and made it suitable to the Brazilian taste and now are doing well. We are a learning machine, we improve and we get better.

Being ad-free helps

We have no advertising absolutely. When one is in a business like YouTube or Spotify that are ad-supported, having a local team in the market is a necessity since they have to sell ads. Ours is a very simple business; it is subscription-only and hence we do not need the sales force that an ad-supported company needs from the day one. We have to grow subscriptions in order to be able to afford more content and in order to grow our margins, so we can earn back the investments that we are making in expansion globally and the investment on the content. We are spending $5 billion on content this year.

The Big P

We have had a lot of discussions internally about the pricing of the service relative to the GDP. At this stage we are focused on the wealthier consumer for whom $8 a month is still a pretty good deal for the kind of entertainment he is getting. As we go deeper in the market, we will be looking at the equation. We believe that people are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for content if they get it quickly and at a reasonable price.